The present invention relates to identifying a time position of a data stream of multimedia content by using a feature vector of multimedia content data being reproduced.
The prevalence of broadband has lead to a rapid increase in services of distributing multimedia contents such as video images. However, contents with captions or audio descriptions for people with visual and hearing impairments hardly exist. For this reason, in order to improve accessibilities, it is strongly desired that captions or audio descriptions for people with visual and hearing impairments be provided as metadata for video image contents distributed on the Internet. Currently, content providers are not equipped with metadata for captions or audio descriptions in many cases, such that a need has been rapidly increasing for building an infrastructure allowing a third party organization such as volunteers to provide metadata.
However, the current content players do not include a structure to interpret metadata provided by third party organizations. Moreover, since various types of content players are used, it is assumed that a considerable amount of time is needed for all of the content players to implement support for metadata provided by the third party organizations. Normally, since metadata is synchronized with the content by use of time stamps including the starting point of the content as the origin, the playback position of the content player needs to be obtained. However, not all of the playback positions of various kinds of content players can be obtained. For this reason, the problem cannot be sufficiently solved by the attempt to reproduce metadata in synchronization with the content by interpreting the metadata by an external application.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-339038 discloses a device which determines a timing to provide a particular service on the basis of a feature vector of media. Here, a certain feature vector, and degree of appropriateness (the degree of appropriateness for providing the specific service) are registered in advance, and the degree of appropriateness is then obtained from the feature vector of media being reproduced. When the degree of appropriateness is greater than a threshold value, the service is provided; in other words, the timing at which an advertisement or the like is to be inserted is determined. Accordingly, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-339038 is to determine whether or not it is appropriate to provide a service, but is not to specify a time stamp of media.